In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

>> 185 6 Forging a Common Tradition In the two decades after World War II, Jews, like other Americans, joined religious congregations in increasing numbers. As new congregations sprouted in postwar suburbs, rabbis’ messages reached more people and women’s organizations linked to congregations saw their numbers mushroom. In the 1950s, synagogues—often in suburbs—became the communal centers of Jewish life. They benefited from the national rush to join organizations that continued from the postwar years through the 1960s. Indeed, membership in groups of all kinds, from religious associations to bowling leagues, marked that era of American history.1 When television’s three major national broadcast networks rose to dominate the national airwaves, they lent an aura of mass culture that augmented the drive toward conformity that supported the era’s clubbiness . In those postwar years, as in previous decades, Jews in America came to see Judaism through the lenses of their American experience. Once again, they tinkered with Hanukkah to make it serve their own needs and reflect their own values, ideals, and concerns. 186 > 187 ened the league’s educational programs.3 Yet those accomplishments did not earn women a postwar rest. Emotional stress added to Jewish women’s burdens. They grieved, as did other American women, for loved ones in the armed services who were lost in the war—eight thousand American Jewish men died as war casualties.4 Jews constituted “roughly nine percent of the U.S. uniformed personnel,” almost triple their percentage of the U.S. population .5 Until the war ended, fear remained that Germany could win the war and then annihilate America’s Jews. Jubilation came at the defeat of the Axis powers. But the immensity of Europe’s Jewish losses “exceeded even the most pessimistic previous reports” of their deaths made during the war. Howard Fasts’s 1948 fictionalized account of the Maccabean revolt, My Glorious Brothers, with its anguished descriptions of Jewish carnage, captured a general mood.6 Women’s religious groups had, for decades, as we have seen, urged their members to celebrate Judaism’s domestic rites. They echoed rabbis —Reform, Conservative, and some Orthodox—whose reminders had become fixtures of rabbinic messages to their congregations since the mid-nineteenth century. Home rites could help women accomplish the “Herculean” duty Kopelman had in mind: raising Jewish children . Unprecedented complications and emotional burdens seemed to be involved. The shrinking numbers of American Jews and threats to world Jewry that elicited such worry about child-rearing in the interwar years set the stage for concerted and serious attention to children after the war. In the interwar years, every American Jewish child had become even more precious because Jewish immigration had been reduced to a trickle and because American Jews tended toward smaller families. Now, after World War II, Jews felt increasing urgency that each Jewish child must now grow into a healthy adult with a strong Jewish identity because one-third of the world’s Jews had been murdered. Yet, although postwar parents found more expert advice, as we will see, they could rely on less hands-on familial support. In response, many women’s groups and rabbis further reshaped home festivals such as Hanukkah from religious celebrations into tools for parenting. Former Jewish generations, Kopelman claimed, passed on to their children “precepts of good character . . . and responsibilities,” through “painful and crude” methods that modern parents could no longer use. 188 > 189 again assumed significance as a tool in achieving a goal that seemed more important than ever.8 Kopelman also may have thought it more difficult to raise postwar children because new mothers received less help from extended kin. Few suburban homes provided sufficient space for three generations. Increasingly, as older people lived longer and housing patterns changed, nuclear families lived apart from more experienced parents. Moreover, as child-rearing styles changed, by the 1940s, “a majority of American parents, when polled, claimed it was vital to raise their children differently from the way their own parents had raised them.”9 Few may have wanted grandparents around. Yet that left new parents to solve problems on their own. Not surprisingly, the 1946 book Baby and Child Care, which opened with the comforting words “You know more than you think you do,” made its author, Dr. Benjamin Spock, a household name. In the 1950s, it seemed that Jews did not participate in the postwar baby boom to the same degree as Protestant or Catholic families and so may not have grown comfortably...

Share